When was the last time Nicole Kidman played a poor person? A glance through the actress’s oeuvre reveals enough titled ladies, posh executives, and moneyed suburbanites to keep an army of financial advisers in Rolexes. One has to go back to the gay-conversion drama Boy Erased (2018) to find the Australian laboring among the plebs, and even there her hairdressing matriarch lived in a comfortable Arkansas two-story. Not since Cold Mountain (2003) has a Kidman character missed a meal, and not since Far and Away (1992) has one experienced real penury. I point this out not as a Marxist provocateur but as a critic interested in types. In Netflix’s latest, Kidman is a novelist by the gold-plated name of Greer Garrison Winbury. Wouldn’t you know it, she owns a $40 million palace on the Nantucket coast.

That estate, donned Summerland by its inhabitants, is the setting of The Perfect Couple, a sprightly new limited series based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand. Sprawling and luxuriously placed, Summerland is the kind of hideaway where the seafood and champagne arrive in “towers.” As the show opens, Greer is hosting a wedding of such extravagance that even the hors d’oeuvres look happy to be there. Yet not every WASP appurtenance is working for the team. When, at the end of the first episode, a body washes up on shore, police soon find an oyster shucker near the corpse. The solution, at least to this Southern boy, is plain enough. Massachusetts did it.